> What specific policy are you suggesting?
I think the biggest problem is the hyper-focus on a single cause of death. People look at the covid-19 death numbers, and have no idea how many people actually die in a normal year.
And this causes people to focus on ensuring nobody dies of covid-19 to the exclusion of everything else. Yes, it absolutely sucks that a lot of vulnerable people in elder care facilities have died of it, but it's equally tragic that a lot of them have died of cognitive decline due to not being allowed to see their family and friends, or not being allowed to see each other.
Or that people are dying or going to die because hospitals and patients alike are postponing care and checkups and routine surgeries, because they're afraid of hospitals being overrun with covid-19 patients, or because they're afraid hospitals will increase spread.
I belong to the privileged class of people who can work from home, I've done it for years, and I live far away from friends and family, so I've been doing weekly video calls for years. The effect for me, personally, is pretty much zero. A lot of people who drive policy are like me, and therefore think lockdowns are no big deal.
But lockdowns are absolutely miserable for a large amount of people. There's a very good reason that we're seeing violent anti-lockdown protests in several countries, because a lot of people are completely fed up with the restrictions.
So, in terms of specific policy, I want governments to encourage and enable people to isolate and distance and keep themselves safe, but I don't want them to enforce it. People have to be allowed to make their own choices, their own risk analysis, and live with the consequences. As we already do for a lot of things.
One example of encouragement is to have good sickpay policies in place, so that no-one feels they "have to" get to work even though they're sick or possibly infected, either out of social obligation or financial necessity.
> and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.
It's too hard to lock down and isolate a fraction of the population, therefore the solution is to lock down the entire population, except "essential" workers? This argument doesn't make sense to me.